The number of personal injury claims made in the North West counties is low compared to the rest of the country. In Donegal, 269 awards were made to people by the Personal Injuries Board in 2015, 134 were made in Sligo and 55 in Leitrim. However the insurance industry is warning that bogus claimants will ensure that these figures rise in all areas in the coming years. CFM group, one of Ireland’s last general insurance brokers warns there is a ‘very small but dangerous cohort of people out there who engage in the practice of falsifying claims’. They are calling for a register to be set up to prevent false claimants.
Jonathan Hehir, Managing Director of the CFM Group, warns that while the figures are low in this region it’s still affecting small business-owners and is set to get worse. Fraudulent claims don’t just directly hurt businesses, they also lead to a spike in insurance premiums for honest Irish business owners and motorists. While the figures have not spiked as massively in the North West as they have across other regions in the country, if even a fraction of the claims are coming from the growing cohort of professional insurance claimants the overall costs for Irish businesses could well be astronomical.
Source: Ocean FM
Read more about the growing calls for a unified industry wide claims register to curb the activities of serial claimants below.
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